Lisa Rinna Tells the Truth about Her Lips

Say this for Lisa Rinna: She has loose lips as far as her thick lips are concerned.

"That's the pink elephant in the room," the actress, 45, said on Monday's Today show. "This is the first time I have told what I have done to my lips."

It all started 23 years ago, said Rinna as her husband, former L.A. Law star Harry Hamlin, watched from the wings. "I had silicone put in my top lip, not the bottom lip."

The look she was after was what Barbara Hershey had in the Bette Midler movie Beaches, "plump and beautiful," said Rinna. "I was gullible enough to go and do it."

Not that she was dissatisfied with the outcome. She loved the look, which, she noted, "made me who I am."

The Reversal

But then the silicone hardened, and the look of the scar tissue was no longer plump and beautiful. Next came a cortisone injection, and that was "gross," she said.

But that, in a nutshell, is the saga of Rinna's pucker apparatus. "I do not blow up and down my lips," she assured fans.

There to promote her book, Rinnavation, due to be published Tuesday, Rinna – who also appears in a Playboy spread this month that her husband described as "awesome" – discussed the book's self-help points. This includes how she got her sex drive back after having children, "or else risk losing Harry," as well as diet and fitness advice.